Ripl takes on social networking

Ripl, which I mentioned in the post below, is a new social networking service created by former Classmates.com executive Bill Messing and others.

Ripl’s Bill Messing

The seven-person company is unveiling itself for the first time today, though during this test phase it will only be available to those who have a University of Washington e-mail address. It has raised about $1.5 million in financing.

Does the world really need another Web site that helps people share information with friends and family? After all, this list on Wikipedia names nearly 100 other social networking services (Note that it also leaves out a few).

Despite the competition, Messing is supremely confident that Ripl will succeed.

That’s partly because the startup has designed a new advertising platform that allows users to choose their own sponsors and a technology that automatically publishes content to specific pages. The invitation-only service also is set up so users can share information with select audiences.

Other social networking startups also are attempting to solve the security and privacy issues that have plagued some of the big names. But Messing believes Ripl is better.

“There is a school of thought that says it is all a guessing game and when you release you are going to be a big hit or you are going to flunk out and this whole social networking thing is a bet and the successes that do occur happen by accident. We have a very different view, which is if you are watching carefully and have invested the time to instrument the site so that you can see user behavior and do optimization as you go along, you can manage the thing to success…. We will get it to a point where it will self-propagate and that is a big, big difference between what we are doing and almost any other startup at our stage that you could name, because there is this sort of sense that you put it out there and hope. That is not what we are doing at all. We are definitely going to manage it to success.”

I then asked Messing how he plans to compete with the other social networking services in the market. Here is what he had to say:

“The hundreds of (other social networking services) that are out there, don’t necessarily have the depth of experience they need to cross all the dimensions of this domain and don’t necessarily make the investment they need to instrument the site and observing the user behavior in a way that allows them to test and tune and optimize. I am not saying that cavalierly. I have spent a lot of time in the trenches understanding optimization algorithms and best practices and how we will actually ratchet up the response as we go along. And frankly, I talk to people in other startups and I hear things that raise the hackles on the back of my neck.”